Rockefeller University

Worker ants, despite their diligence, seldom encounter opportunities for social mobility. In many species, individuals adhere to strict caste roles: queens lay eggs and workers take care of almost everything else, including ...

For lovers throughout the animal kingdom, finding a suitable mate requires the right chemistry. Now, scientists at The Rockefeller University have been able to map an unexpected path in which evolution arranged for animals ...

At some point in life, most of us will contract Tropheryma whipplei without even knowing it. For one in a million infected people, however, this bacterium will make itself blatantly known by causing Whipple's disease, an ...

The factors that shape the destiny of a cell, like that of a fully formed person, remain something of a mystery. Why, for example, does one stem cell in a human embryo become a neuron rather than a muscle cell? And why does ...

For a stem cell, the future is wide open. It can divide infinitely to create more stem cells, or it can grow up into other kinds of cells, taking its place in the heart, brain, or other organs. But the stem cell loses something ...

Mom always said you could get germs from playing in the dirt. Now, scientists have taken that advice a step further: a Rockefeller University team collected more than 2,000 soil samples from nearby New York City parks, and ...

Death is certain for all living things, including the body's cells. The act of dying is in fact as sophisticated as any process a cell might perform during its lifetime—and when glitches in cell death occur, they can lead ...

Like an island nation, the nucleus of a cell has a transportation problem. Evolution has enclosed it with a double membrane, the nuclear envelope, which protects DNA but also cuts it off from the rest of the cell. Nature's ...

All of the proteins necessary for life are made by giant molecular machines called ribosomes. A ribosome, in turn, is built from proteins and ribosomal RNAs stitched together with immaculate precision.